Iraq War Blues

Right now my moms is at an airport in Maryland
waiting on a plane to send her to Germany, then to Kuwait, then to Iraq.
She turns fifty years old on Thursday. At first, I thought she was an
anomaly. I believed that there were no other 40+ year old women headed
to Iraq.

I was wrong. With my mother there are at least two
other women in their forties.

It is a distressing thing to get
emails describing training drills that involve jumping out of Humvees
and handling assault rifles. You grow up watching "G.I. Joe" and all of the
war movies and war is a glamorous thing. Even people who die seem to die
heroically, or at least as a part of someone else's hero tale. The wars
are always fought by the young. You never see the weary eyes of a man
who knows too much blood and is much too honest after three shots of
bourbon. And yet, the failure to see what I'm beginning to recognize as
the reality of war is not the disturbing thing. What's disturbing is how
the president and vice president continue to talk about the 90,000
troops to be returning home from Iraq between now and summer. Just two
days ago the AP quotes Biden as saying the Iraq war hasn't been worth
its "horrible price." It also mentions the 90,000 combat troops. My
mother and her friends, the people in her unit, platoon or whatever
slang they use laugh at those numbers -- because they have inherited the
stories of the men and women they are replacing.

The most moving war piece I ever read was O'Brien's The Things They
Carried and maybe that was only half a truth. I don't remember women in
his book. Were there women in 'Nam? Is the woman in war a different
kind of victim of invisibility?

To be fair, my mother isn't a
combat troop - but there is no such distinction made when the Post
reports the deaths of American troops has risen to 4,376.

But the
tragedy isn't as much the half truths I hear listening to Biden or the president, it's that I can name so many women who joined the military
reserves as a way out of poverty. That's not to say that there is a lack
of patriotism - just that maybe the cost rent, or a car note, or a
student loan, or of diapers was likely more heavy on the mind than
patriotism. I think my mom, and any other woman who ends up in Iraq
didn't plan on going to war - nor really thought about ducking the war
once it was upon them; but, it seems right to fail to understand a
system that leaves a 50-year-old woman fighting in a war. I wonder where
are the medals for them. To refuse deployment is to invite the horror
of a jail cell into your life. Alexis Hutchinson knows that. She refused
deployment because she had no one to care for her 10-month old -- but
maybe she was just afraid of dying. I wouldn't blame her. In the end
Hutchinson received a less than honorable discharge. Here's a quote from
an article in the Times:

Some legal experts speculated that
Specialist Hutchinson's commanders threatened court-martial to send a
message to other single-parent soldiers in the brigade. Last year, more
than 10,000 single parents on active military duty deployed
overseas.

In a way, I feel like a draft, at least, would
send me to Iraq and not my mother. Would send my cousins instead of
women with new born babies. Instead of what seems like a lot of single
mothers. And it's a problem when that becomes the logic. Especially in a
war that the Vice President says hasn't been worth "it's horrible
price."

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